Hidden inside the trunks of several ancient trees is the story of the rise and fall of a civilisation.
Their tree rings tell of dramatic changes in a 1,000-year-old rain fall record and how a tribe in Mpumalanga evolved their farming methods to cope with long periods of drought.
Bakoni are unique — they are one of the few societies in sub-Saharan Africa to have developed terraced farming. Why they did so has recently become clearer because of a growing understanding of weather patterns through the work of dendrochronology or the study of tree rings.
Bakoni built their terraced farms close to their villages. They began doing this, believes Alex Schoeman, an archaeologist at Wits University, in response to a tailing off in rainfall in the 1700s.
"This allowed them to hold on when other people couldn’t," Schoeman explains. "This system allowed them to flourish."
This method of farming, where "steps" are cut into the side of a hill, helps retain water and prevents nutrients in the soil from being washed away. Bakoni’s terraced lands would have held millet, sorghum and beans. After maize made its way from the Americas, it ended up in the terraced gardens too.
With their lands so close to their kraals and homes, Schoeman believes this is an example of early urban farming.
Aerial photography reveals there were roads that interlinked homesteads to their farms. Schoeman believes they were built to keep cattle from straying into the fields.
"This is advanced town planning," she says.
It is estimated that some of Bokoni towns may have housed as many as 25,000 people.
But while the remains of their terraced farms, and homesteads still dot the landscape, from Carolina to Orighstad, little is known about this society. The reason, says Schoeman is that Bakoni were written out
of history after they were indirectly killed off by the weather patterns they had so expertly learnt to harness.
More is also being discovered about the Bokoni through archaeology and a few surviving oral histories. And what they are finding out is relevant today.
According to Pedi oral tradition, they encountered Bakoni in the mid 17th century after crossing the Crocodile River. Bakoni were then living in valleys. There is little archaeological evidence that Bakoni exchanged goods, although Schoeman suspects that they were plugged into a wider trade network.
For a while rainfall was good, and when it did taper off Bakoni were able to cope. But by the early 19th century, this all changed. Stephan Woodborne of the National Research Foundation’s iThemba laboratories can place his finger on the year when it started going bad for Bakoni. It was 1816, and he knows this from his collection of tree ring samples. His collection includes several 1,000-year-old or more baobabs in Limpopo, a yellowwood from KwaZulu-Natal and Mukwa trees in Namibia.
Woodborne has also analysed trees found in Bokoni sites. And he has been able to compare the southern African sample to trees in Madagascar which, at the time of the 1816 drought, was experiencing above-average rainfall.
Communities’ collapse
Woodborne’s analysis relies on studying the annual rings trees develop which are influenced by weather and rainfall. The drought that began in 1816, and moved from west to east, was to be the worst in 1,000 years. Historians argue it was the driver that caused the collapse of many communities across SA.
"This was beyond the realm of anything that anyone had experienced. It lasted 10 years and, even today, if we experienced a drought like this we would feel it in the cities and it would cause people to move," Woodborne says.
He believes that, even with their advanced farming methods, Bakoni would have struggled against this drought.
There were other factors too that impacted negatively on Bakoni. Some historians believe the drought triggered the Difiqane, a period of chaos that saw massed migration, raiding and warfare. There were reports of tribes reduced to cannibalism. This was the time of the emergence of Shaka.
Schoeman believes that Bakoni might have also had to do deals with slave traders working out of Mozambique. To protect themselves, they moved from the valleys and their terraced lands into narrower kloofs. "It becomes difficult to produce in a kloof, as there is limited sunlight," she says.
For a short period Bakoni made a comeback. Under a chief called Marangrang, they regrouped and expanded up to what is now Mashinini. It is believed that he reoccupied the capital of Khutwaneng with its terracing. But around 1830 Marangrang made his last stand, north of the Olifants River, against the Bapedi.
When he fell, says Schoeman, so did his people. Bakoni scattered and some were absorbed by other tribes.
"Some moved back and made attempts to regroup, but they didn’t get the space to recover as it became Boer land," Schoeman says.
By the early 20th century, Bakoni were reduced to stories that appeared in the oral histories of other peoples. As the decades passed, those faded.
But even though Bakoni are gone, Schoeman feels that they can still teach a new generation of farmers how to overcome adversity.
"They withstood some of the worst conditions and this has implications on how we understand small-scale farming in the present. It shows that, through land reform, small-scale farming can contribute to the surplus and can be made profitable."
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